Social media companies are facing pressure to start archiving war crimes evidence. How will that work?
On May 12, four members of Congress in the U.S. wrote to the CEOs of YouTube, TikTok, Twitter and Meta asking the social media giants to create a digital archive that would preserve videos, photos, and other evidence of war crimes as people post them online.
This is not a new idea, but the war in Ukraine has reinvigorated long-standing calls for Big Tech companies to change the way they treat this kind of material. Platforms often remove such content due to its graphic nature, despite its potential value in the courtroom. For years, groups in the human rights sector like Mnemonic and WITNESS have called for social media companies to change their approach, so that videos don’t just vanish when an algorithm pulls them down for showing gratuitous violence. The conversation grew as the war in Syria showed just how much evidence was disappearing because of content moderation algorithms.
But streamlining a process for collecting data, building such a massive repository of data and then scaling up to include other global conflicts won’t be an easy task.
Long before politicians caught on, Alexa Koenig, the executive director of the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley, was working on how social media can be used as evidence in international courts — and how companies can do a better job of preserving it. In the report Digital Lockers: Archiving Social Media Evidence of Atrocity Crimes, Koenig and her team outlined how social media platforms can transform from “accidental and unstable archives for human rights content” to vaults of evidence accessible to investigators and prosecutors. Going a step further, the team at the Human Rights Center created a framework for using digital open source information in international courts.